Knives. Scissors. Razors. Blades everywhere.
Everywhere you looked, everywhere, everywhere, everywhere—in an asylum full
of homicidal psychos. Kevin Boda turned on his heel and quietly made
his way to the door. No job was worth it. No way…

Eyes. Eyes were watching.
Rosa Crite was no longer doing her job at the check-in desk. She was
acting the part of doing her job. It was all poses and pantomime for
whoever was watching her. There were cameras, of course. It was
the entrance to the high security wing, even the staff had a special
check-in station before they could pass beyond Rosa’s desk into the red
zone, so of course there were cameras watching all the time. That was
the norm. Not like today. Today, there were other eyes
watching, she could feel it. Rosa played along, pretending to do her
job. She wouldn’t do anything to attract attention. She would
wait for her break, then she would collect her things and walk down the
hall, like always. Instead of going into the break room, she’d walk
right past it like she was going to the soda machine. Nobody watching
would think anything of that. Then she would walk just as calmly and
naturally out the door. Whatever they were planning with those peering
eyes, they wouldn’t get her. No sir, she was going straight home,
close all the blinds so that nobody could see in, and stay there for a very
long time. Nobody would see her do anything for the rest of the week.

Worms! Snakes! Slithering, creepy, crawling—AHHHHHH!
Gavin Worsted ran screaming from the parking lot. “Don’t forget your
nametag?” the thin, bookish figure called after him, picking the combination
nametag/key card from the puddle where it had fallen. “Oh, look at
that,” Jonathan Crane smiled wickedly. “Try and warn a fellow he’s
getting a flat tire, what does he do but leave his ID in a pothole.” A
malevolent snicker followed, while Jonathan slid the card into his pocket.
He returned to his car, adjusted his wig, and turned back onto the main road
towards Arkham.

It really was much easier, getting to the Arkham staff from the outside,
as they went about their daily lives. Much easier. Their guard
was up on the inside, but out here in the world, at the laundromat, at the
supermarket, pumping gas at the mini-mart near the asylum, it was shooting
fish in a barrel. The only real challenge was figuring out the time
release on Boda and Crite’s doses. Boda was a 220 pound guard, Crite a
130 pound nurse administrator, and he didn’t know when either of them ate
dinner. It was difficult to be precise about when, exactly, the toxin
would kick in, so he hedged his bets, giving each a phobia that should
provoke a quiet exit rather than the screaming flight Mr. Worsted had
just demonstrated.

So much for getting in. Jonathan Crane’s knowledge of the asylum
procedures let him waltz in through the employee entrance and passageways as
far as Rosa Crite’s desk. Gavin Worsted’s keycard got him through
security station as it had through all the others, and no Rosa Crite was
sitting there to check that his appearance matched the photo on the keycard.
No Kevin Boda was there to relieve, and once again, no Rosa Crite was there
to notice his absense or expect either of them to sign a shift changeover
sheet. It really was ridiculously easy getting as far as Joker’s cell.
Once he got there, however…

“HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAA!”

…the situation became a bit more complicated.

It’s not unusual for a man to make some gesture after a particularly
enjoyable date. Most send flowers the next day, but Bruce was not
“most men.” He was Batman. He wanted to do something personal.
So he took a few minutes before his morning workout and set up a new keyword
matrix to sift the autodownloads.

“You made me a search routine?” Selina asked, that ‘you’re so cute when
you’re a geek’ smile dancing on her lips.

“Selina, every night the Batcomputer downloads massive amounts of
information from all sorts of public and private mainframes.”

“I know, I remember my first visit to this cave very well, thank you.
You download everything that exists in digitalia and you’ve got this Gordian
knot of algorithms sifting it while you sleep, tagging all the keywords that
pertain to all the rogues and ferreting out potential targets and clues for
you to read through after your workout. Everything works splendidly
(grunt) until some soccer team in Barcelona calls themselves ‘Demons’ and
you have to recalibrate. I get that. I just don’t quite get—oh
my god, a new Bastet temple in Alexandria? When did they find that?”

Bruce’s lip twitched.

“Four hours ago,” Bruce said coolly, the pride in his equipment and his
subroutines betrayed only by a subtle pat of the control as his fingers slid
to the keyboard to pull the full datastream. “These digital
photographs were sent to the Supreme Council of Antiquities funding the dig,
and it looks like a Mr. Hendawi from the Cairo office will be writing
up the press release later this week once the details are confirmed.”

“Large number of statues depicting the cat-goddess Bastet found in the
ruins,” Selina murmured as she skimmed the documents. “thought to
belong to Queen Berenice, wife of King Ptolemy III who ruled Egypt in the
3rd century B.C… first trace of the long-sought location of Alexandria's
royal quarter… would indicate that the worship of the ancient Egyptian
cat-goddess continued during the later, Greek-influenced, Ptolemaic period!”
This last quote was followed by a loud, girlish squeal (which upset several
of the bats overhead) and her throwing her arms around Bruce with a warm,
wet kiss, as if he personally brought about the Ptolemaic-era worship of the
cat-goddess Bast.

“You’re welcome,” he said softly, touching the tip of his thumb to her
lips and then letting his index finger stroke gently under her chin.
“Enjoy your present. I’ll be in the chem lab working on an antidote
for the new fear toxin.”

“You mean just GO?!” Joker asked incredulously. “Just walk out the
door, what kind of an escape is that?!”

“Out the fire exit,” Scarecrow explained again. “It’s a perfectly
good way to get out. I have air transportation waiting.”

“A balloon!” Joker cried. “With my own delightful grin painted on,
so they’ll see us smiling as we float away!”

“It has no style, I won’t go,” Joker said firmly, and Scarecrow rubbed
his brow. “A Joker escape is an event, sir. It is a happening.
There are expectations. I can’t just WALK OUT THE DOOR.”

“Yes, you can,” Crow insisted, poking at the Joker’s chest with his index
finger. “You put one foot in front of the other until we’re out on the
roof, then we take off, you say thank you, and we’re out of here!”

“Exactly, saying thank you! No ‘Thank you, you’ve been a great
audience’ before I depart? It’s rude, sir. Rude, I say. I
shall not compromise the integrity of the Joker brand with such an inferior
departure.”

“Fine, what’s it going to take? Banana peels? Banana cream
pie? Leave a bucket of acid balanced on the door when we go?
Will that satisfy you?”

Joker raised an eyebrow, then he clapped his hands and became all
business.

“Okay, if we’re going to do this, we’ll need a hatchet, a willing
chicken, and some snakes.”

“I literally cannot tell if you’re serious,” Scarecrow said flatly.

“I am always serious,” Joker said, with as grim a deadpan as he could
manage under that permanent grin. Then… “HAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA!
Just joshing you, ya lopsided bag o’ hay. Bucket of acid over the door
will do fine. We’ll make up for it next time. Instead of a
chicken—flamingos! HAHAHAHAHA! Harley always did like pink.
Set that up that bucket, and then we’ll go and get you that brain.”

Selina had padded silently into the chem lab and watched. Unable to
see exactly what Bruce was doing at the work table, she decided to forego
the pounce she had planned. A pounce was always fun—but not if there
were samples of fear toxin to be knocked over. So instead of a
vigorous outburst of impassioned felinity, she just quietly cleared her
throat.

“Is that a purr?” Bruce asked without turning.

“More than a purr. I just found… Bruce, the downloads you tagged
for me, the Joshua Bell tour schedule is in there. So is information
on a chocolate tasting tour of Paris. Now, at the risk of stating the
obvious: that’s not art, it’s not jewels, and it’s not cats. Even if I
went for the idea of stealing Joshua Bell’s Stradivarius on the ‘catgut’
angle—which is a stretch—there’s no way to work the chocolate tasting into a
cat crime.”

“So in with all the cats and Cartier, there’s Joshua Bell and chocolate—”

“And Irene Adler and Chanel and that Dan Brown book you were enjoying so
much last week and—mph-mm-mmm.”

Caution was tossed aside, and Selina had flung herself forward to impart
another passionate kiss.

Scarecrow had been uncertain what to
do about Harley. On the one hand, she was part of Joker’s shtick.
If he was going to observe the mad clown in action—study the beast in his
element, so to speak—he should provide everything that Joker was used to
having. That’s why he had the Z make him a Ha-Hacienda instead of
replacing the lair Batman discovered the night of the armored car robberies
with one of a similar theme. Unfortunately, “everything Joker was used
to having” included Harley Quinn and not some generic henchwench he could
pick up at the Iceberg and dress in tassels instead of straw. Harley
was fine as wenches went, but she didn’t have as flexible a relationship
with reality as Joker did. Joker had a way of going along with
whatever he was presented with. If Scarecrow was hanging around the
hacienda acting as if they had already agreed on a team-up, there would be a
team-up. With Harley, you could never be sure. She might just
assume Mistah J had knowingly agreed to all this, or she might not. If
she didn’t, he’d have to explain. That would be mortifying.
Joker telling the whole Iceberg that Scarecrow had come to him for “Fear
lessons.” HAHAHAHA. “A little peer review, eh,
Professor?” Not funny.

On the other hand, Harley might just accept the situation as easily as
Joker did. If she did, she’d be an asset. She already knew how
Joker worked: what he liked, what he didn’t like—and she provided an
alternative target. Even in the interests of science, even in the
service of this current mission to uncover the formula for ultimate fear,
Joker really wasn’t somebody you wanted to be alone with if you could help
it. Harley was a distraction. So Jonathan decided to include
her. It turned out to be the right decision. She was a
distraction that knew her way around a regulation Hacienda. She could
look over the invoice left by the Z and explain which items were expected
(tangerine colored chairs, red stripped curtains, “festive” pillows, barrels
of glue, glitter, silly putty, battery acid, and confetti) and which were
the Z’s trademark extras bought on your nickel to entertain themselves
(vintage Donkey Kong machine, paintball gear for 7, and a brick barbecue
pit).

Once the ha-ha-happy couple were settled in—a process that consisted of
Joker playing Donkey Kong for half an hour while Harley went out to buy Ho
Hos and Ding Dongs—Scarecrow began carefully laying out his plan so Joker
could, well, “Joker it up” a little.

Selina stared at the viewscreen, pale with disbelief as a pair of radiant
cut, fancy yellow diamonds were displayed from several angles in an
automated slideslow.

“This is the most revolting thing I’ve seen since that mummy chamber,”
she said hoarsely.

“You’re not still on that Cairo story,” Bruce said, coming over to her
workstation and glancing at the screen over her shoulder.

“Oh no, all done with that. I just mentioned the mummy because—long
story. Temple outside of Belize. There was a jaguar god, there
was a jaguar altar, there was a booby trap and I fell through it onto a pile
of skulls, and there was a mummy. Occasionally, cliché is served and
crime really doesn’t pay. Point is, it was really disgusting for an
hour or two. It held the record for just how icky something
cat-related and valuable can be—until now. These… these are lab-grown
diamonds… made from cats.”

Bruce said nothing. He just stared blankly at the screen.
Selina continued.

“DNA2Diamonds,” she quoted.
“They say they’ll make these lab-grown, heirloom quality gemstones from the
hair or ashes of—I can’t say it—of a departed pet. Now, much as I love
Shimbala and Nirvana, much as I love Whiskers and Nutmeg, I don’t see making
them into earrings.”

“It does seem a little odd,” Bruce admitted. He didn’t say it out
loud, but privately it reminded him of the sort of thing certain League
villains had attempted: encasing Superman, Wonder Woman and other heroes in
high pressure, high temperature incubators that simulated conditions below
the Earth’s crust, with the stated objective of pressing them into uniquely
powered gemstones.

“Yep, they’ll do people,” Selina said, as if she was privy to his
thoughts—but really because she was following some line of thought of her
own. “Have grandma made into a broach to match the Fido and Spot
earrings. This is just nuts. I mean technically it is diamonds
and cats, but if I was still working, I wouldn’t touch these things with a
bargepole.”

Joker threw his hands up over his head as if he was signaling a
touchdown, then stretched them out wide, letting out a loud yawn.

“Bor-ing!” he sang. “It’s just so borrrrrrrring. Hey, did
you hear that, I rolled the ‘r,’ like that French guy that thought he was
Batman. Okay, so, straw-for-brains, why go after this bug eye dude?”

“Bugidole,” Scarecrow corrected. “Dr. Rupert Bugidole, of the
Behavior Sciences Institute, because he is a BULLY!”

“Yeah, learn a new song already,” Joker yawned. “I mean, why pick
on the bully all the time? Where’s the funny?”

“Bullies dominate, blame, and use others,” Scarecrow said in his stiffest
Professor Crane delivery. “They lack empathy and foresight, and do not
accept responsibility for their actions. They are concerned only about
themselves and crave attention, due to their deservedly low self-esteem.
It is that lack of self-esteem that leads them to put other people down in
order to feel better about themselves.”

“Pbbbbbbt,” Dr. Quinzel replied. “Completely outdated
thinking, Dr. Crane. The typical bully has an inflated sense of
self-worth, a sense of entitlement and superiority over others, which
results in the lack compassion, as well as deficiencies in the areas of
impulse control and social skills.”

“Oh I must object,” Crane said, shaking his head vigorously. “The
supposed ego and sense of superiority is a blind, an attempt to conceal from
themselves their own self-loathing. They despise themselves for their
many inadequacies, and mask it with a superficial arrogance. They
would prefer to interact normally, but lacking the capacity to do so, they
tell themselves that they are above such things.”

It wasn’t helpful. Okay, Joker
was crazy. Scarecrow knew that when he began. But “crazy” on its
own was nothing. You couldn’t say a mad man did mad things because he
is mad—not unless you were Jervis, and that was another conversation
entirely. But there had to be something that made the screwy inanity
make sense. A guy walking around in a sailor suit, no pants, speaking
unintelligibly and getting into fights—well, he’s crazy. Until you
find out he thinks he’s Donald Duck. Still crazy, but now the crazy
makes sense.

Joker’s crazy didn’t make any sense. It all seemed so random and so
extreme. A put-on. You’d almost think he was a perfectly sane
sociopath pretending to be a madman—except, of course, that that would be
crazy. Ha ha ha.

“Look,” Scarecrow said, exasperated. “Assuming I can find us some…
‘funnier’ victims, what do you think about the rest of it?”

Joker scratched his head.

“What are we doing to them again? Oh, right, scaring the pants off
them.”

Joker and Scarecrow considered it, but they decided Arnold Wesker would
take it the wrong way.

“Key-4,” Selina said, scrunching up her nose. “A paper-thin square
of C-4 to slide into a reinforced door to blast it open.”

“Sounds effective,” Bruce noted.

“Pfft, I hate blowing safes, I hate blowing doors. It’s for
amateurs. I like to take the high road.”

“The… high road,” Bruce said, sensing feline logic was about to enter the
conversation.”

“Yes, the high road. You
crack a safe, you pick a lock, you show the scowling crimefighter
a little leg and suggest fun and novel uses for a batarang that never
occurred to him. Nothing goes boom.”

“…”

Scarecrow was beginning to think he was being played. He had stolen
a helicopter, broken Joker out of Arkham, and paid for an entire furnished
Hacienda including buying the Z a vintage Donkey Kong machine. He was
supposed to be getting some kind of insight into Joker’s power to generate
fear, but Joker didn’t seem to be taking the scheme at all seriously.
This couldn’t be how he planned his own crime sprees. He was just… he
was having Harley dress up in these little outfits. He sat there,
while Jonathan preferred to stand, as she pranced out in one getup after
another. So far they’d seen her as Morticia Adams, a zombie with a
disgusting amount of gore oozing from a gaping wound in her midsection, Anne
Boleyn after the beheading, and a Lovecraftian Elder Thing (which Jonathan
found strangely alluring and if Harley was anyone else’s wench…)

“Okay, this is the best one yet!” Harley called, before making her
appearance as...

“That Christmas Future guy?” Joker said.

“The Grim Reaper,” Crow corrected.

“The what?” Joker said blankly.

“The Grim Reaper.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Death incarnate. Reaper of souls. See the scythe, that makes
it the reaper.”

“You know, Puddin’, the guy from Bill
and Ted’s Bogus Journey?” the Reaper said helpfully, before breaking into an
abbreviated macarena and rapping “You might be a king or a little street
sweeper, but sooner or later you dance with the reaper.”

Joker’s eyeballs rolled up towards Scarecrow and then Harley without
moving his head.

”I really don’t think this is going to scare anyone without toxin,” Joker
said firmly. “Maybe even then. The lemmings are sheep, but it’s
hard to fear a guy who let a couple stoner wannabe musicians sink his
battleship.”

“Puddin’, I think lemmings are actually lemmings. Sheep are
different.”

“Could we possibly get back to the original subject,” Scarecrow said,
ripping the scythe from Grim Harley’s grasp. “Look, the reaper is
DEATH. Everyone’s afraid of death. Here, give me that.”

He hurried Harley through removal of the cloak, donned it himself.
Even without the black gloves and ski mask, the costume was far more
imposing on his tall, pencil thin frame. Giving the hood a final
adjustment, he raced at Joker scythe in hand, and hovered over him poised to
strike, a petrifying apparition that would shrivel the soul to an icy jelly.

Joker peered up at him silently for what seemed like a full minute, and
Jonathan’s spirit soared as he began to realize—incredible as it might
seem—impossible as it might seem—yet every passing moment making the
impossible dream seem more and more probable—every moment of silence making
it seem all the more likely in fact that—yes—he had in fact—he had done
it—was doing it—he had pulled off the impossible—he, Jonathan Crane, had
scared the living piss out of the—

“More cowbell,” Joker said at last.

Scarecrow blinked.

“HAHAHAHAHAAAAA! I get it now, the Reaper. You need more
cowbell, Craney. HAHAHAHA. More—HAHAHAHA—Cowbell.”

Scarecrow swallowed.

“That’s what’s been missing, Johnny-o. That’s what you’re doing
wrong. HAHHAHAHAAA! You’re doing a disservice to yourself and
this whole band—er, yeah, this whole band—you got to get more cowbell.”

Scarecrow did not get the reference.

“So try it again and really, y’know, explore the space.”

After Ra’s al Ghul and Vandal Savage, he was probably the least attuned
to popular culture.

“Más cencerro, mi amigo.”

At least, pop culture outside of horror films.

“Plus de sonnaille. Mehr Kuhglocke. Mais sino da vaca.
Meer koeklok.”

And since he didn’t get the reference in English, he certainly didn’t get
it in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Dutch.

“Latlh cow-jah.”

Or Klingon.

Bruce reached out to touch Selina’s hand, signaling that she shouldn’t
click past this screen yet. He read the document a second time.
Of all the articles, documents and video that had been tagged by Selina’s
search routines, this was by far the most interesting. An internal
memo at the CIA proposed an investigation and debriefing of bestselling
fiction writer Dan Brown.

“It looks like he put some thermal imaging equipment into the hands of
the fictional special ops agents in his book, equipment which the real CIA
actually does have. They want to know if he got lucky making it up, or
if he really knows something.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” Selina said, her
fingers still poised on the next arrow. “I guess you would like
that one, for the same reason I don’t. Night lenses and heat sensors
that can spot the warmth of a body in a darkened room, big whoop, I’ve been
getting around that kind of thing since the Phoenix 9000 was a 6000.
But this ‘differential sensitivity and multi-source integration’… if I’m
reading that right, you can essentially look back in time. So
you’re not seeing where the cat burglar is right now—that’s not going to do
you any good because I left ten minutes ago—but you can actually see
where I was. Where I moved. Do you realize what that means?
I’ve got to get a set of Victor’s frigid-field generators now for my boots!
Like my feet don’t get cold enough this time of year. Not like my
costume is insulated. That’s why I always take the extra time to
disarm the heat cameras instead of wearing those awful cold suits. Now
they’ve got thermal lenses that look back in time, and I have to start
toting around frost cores in my boot heels.”

Bruce couldn’t suppress a chuckle.

“Selina, you don’t have to do
any of that anymore. You’re on the other end of the lenses now,
remember?”

“…”

“Kitten?”

“I prefer not to think of it that way,” she said simply.

Joker was disgusted at the Scarecrow’s ineptitude. Clearly he
needed more cowbell. Since there was no cowbell at the new hacienda
(an oversight for which someone would have to pay dearly), Joker just hit
him with the scythe for a while, then kicked him out onto the street.
A short while later, Harley let the hyenas out to play with him and cheer
him up, but he had gone.

Another day in another mood, Joker would have forgotten the episode
completely in an hour or two, but today, for some reason, he kept finding
little bits of straw as he wandered around the Ha-hacienda. Each new
find served as a reminder: Scarecrow.

“A man so lacking in the fundamentals, he didn’t even bring a chicken to
an Arkham escape. What’s the world coming to, Harls?”

“Cheer up, Puddin’. Have another Ho Ho.”

“Nah,” Joker pouted. “Well, maybe just one. I couldn’t reach
him, Harley. These are the ones that haunt you. He had such
potential. If only—heh, heh-heh, HA!”

“Ooh, that sounds like a good one, Mistah J. Ya got an idea?”

“HAHAHAHAHAHAAA-Right! Why was the Scarecrow not able to achieve his
goals?”

“Not enough cowbell,” Harley declared loyally.

“WRONG! Because he’s not me—HAHAHAHAAAAA! Why didn’t I think
of it before? I can do this fear thing much better than that scrawny
old friend of Dorothy. Pack up the whoopee cushions, Harley, we’re
going to try something new. HA-HA. HA-HA-HA. Oh, HA-HA
HA-HA HA-HA HAAAAAA! This is going to drive Batsy bonkers! HA
HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAA!”

There was silence in the cave, apart from the bat Walapang warning the
other bats off his favorite stalactite, a soft shuffling from the worktable
where Bruce was testing lenses, and a few frustrated grunts from the
gymnasium where Selina was testing out a new harness. The discussion
of the new heat view technologies had escalated into a bet: Batman was going
to build a set as a crimefighting tool, Catwoman was going to plan a heist
to defeat it. If she pulled it off, he would fly her to Cairo in Wayne
One to see the new ruins of the Alexandrian Temple of Bastet. If she
didn’t, she would donate a sum to the Wayne Foundation to underwrite
security improvements at the Gotham Museum of Art.

Not a bet she intended to lose. She had already called Victor for
some basic information about the size, weight, consistency, and placement of
the devices she would need. She had made up “rehearsal props,”
basically, filling rubber balloons with flour or gelatin and affixing them
to her boots, hips, and gloves at key points. After a little practice
on the uneven bars, she would have a better sense how they moved and how
their weight affected her moves. Then she would be able to describe
her requirements to Kittlemeier and—

“Catwoman!” the deep gravel pulled her from her reverie as she adjusted
her balance on the bar.

“No peeking!” she called without dismounting. “We had an…”
She trailed off when she saw his posture standing between the outcroppings
that acted as the doorway to the gymnasium. Words weren’t necessary,
she could sense it. Bruce was gone, there was only Batman, weighed
down with a heavy burden. “Game over. Something’s happened,” she
said, sliding down from the bars without any of her usual flourish, and
walking up to him without any slink or sway in her hips.